OCEAN LECTURE SERIES

"Images of the Deep"
• Tammy Frank, Ph.D.

About the Lecture

Dr. Tammy Frank has been on a number of research expeditions to collect animals for her studies, utilizing both an opening/closing Tucker Trawl and the Johnson-Sea-Link submersibles to carry out these collections. During these research expeditions, a number of unusual animals with unique adaptations for the deep-sea environment were photographed. Some of these animals were used for Dr. Frank's studies, and have been talked about in previous lectures. However, a fair number of these animals have not yet made it into this lecture series, or are so extraordinary that they deserve another look. This talk will focus on describing these remarkable animals, as well as the techniques utilized to collect them.

About the Speaker

Dr. Tammy Frank leads the Visual Ecology program in the Center for Ocean Exploration. Her educational background includes a B.A. from California State University, Long Beach, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from University of California, Santa Barbara. She joined Harbor Branch in 1992 as a Postdoctoral Fellow, after postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Connecticut Medical School and Hatfield Marine Science Center in Oregon. Discovering that Florida is the only state in the continental U.S. that met her temperature requirements, she has been at Harbor Branch ever since.

Tammy's research focuses on the effects of downwelling light on the distribution pattern of midwater animals, as well as functional adaptations of photoreceptors to very dim light environments. Her work combines in situ studies from the Johnson-Sea-Link submersible s to quantify animal distribution patterns with shipboard based laboratory studies on the photosensitivity of animals brought up with midwater trawl nets and deep-sea traps. Her work has been funded by the Whitehall Foundation, the National Science Foundation, the NOAA National Undersea Research Program, and the NOAA Ocean Exploration program. She has been chief scientist on 35 research cruises, and participated on 40 more as a lucky hitchhiker, conducting work in the Gulf of Maine, and off the coasts of the Bahamas, California, the Canary Islands, Cuba, Costa Rica, Florida, and Hawaii. In addition to her research, Tammy teaches Geological and Chemical Oceanography, as well as Functional Biology of Marine Animals lecture and lab in the Harbor Branch/FAU Semester-by-the-Sea program.